A John Carpenter Poll

feel i normally align with darragh on films but Assault on Precinct 13 is good and James Morrison makes an excellent point.

oh deems is talking about the *performances* lol.

ha, develop that

i love any other carpenter ive seen, and was really looking forward to this so am willing to be talked round a bit.

well i’m ion a train but yes i don’t think the performances are v good but probably don’t need to be.

saw this when i was 15 and that’s where it’s status for me comes from. but if i give it a bit of thought i’d say the escalation of violence, from initial incident to gradually coalescing threat is v well managed. that threat coalesces into the specific impacts of bullets etc on the claustrophobic precinct but they’re only ever loosely linked to that brooding presence just beyond the visible iirc. in that respect it’s much like the early parts of the fog.

hmm this is all fair tbh

i hate to be that person doing that thing where youve seen a genuinely bold and influential effort after all the movies that have done it since (and tbf often better, which of course given budget and a template is easy done) and therefore seeing mainly the faults...but i think im that person this time

As I'm sure has been mentioned somewhere on this thread already, Assault is basically Hawks' Rio Bravo transplanted to an urban modern-day setting - but I think knowledge of that actually makes the Carpenter seem more ingenious!

IIRC ex-ilxor Enrique tried to argue somewhere (again, maybe here) that the remake of Assault is better than the original, but he may have been provoking us complacent auteurist at the time.

i’ve only seen the remake once, back when it was released, but i remember it being pretty good

Obviously Carpenter loved Hawks and siege movies, and he would go to that well a lot - even Halloween is ultimately kind of a one-person siege movie - but Assault is also kind of a riff on zombie movies (minus the zombies).

right down to the weather/lubar radio reports at the start

lunar

feel i normally align with darragh on films but Assault on Precinct 13 is good and James Morrison makes an excellent point.

AOP13 is good but it's certainly this (relative to expectations) really understated and bleak and dim movie which i think works effectively as a mood flick more than a kinetic action movie, which is to its credit. i do remember the performances being blatant in terms of the lack of charisma happening onscreen, everything taken away from the performances but the words and the gestures. I mean practically Bressonian in a way tbh.

There's a quote from Simon Pegg on the wiki that sums that up, sort of:

"You wouldn't really call it an action film," claims Pegg, "because it was pre- the evolution of that kind of film. And yet it is kind of an action film in a way."

Which is party why it works as a kind of link between Night of the Living Dead and, I dunno, Die Hard.

Wikipedia says "Assault ... was shot in only 20 days, including Thanksgiving, on a budget of $100,000."

and you can see every dollar on the screen

Carpenter only ever makes siege movies, just sometimes the protagonists are under siege (they live, the fog, prince of darkness), and sometimes they're the ones conducting the siege (big trouble in little china, escape from new york, vampires). His is a world of fortresses.

in dark star the protagonists are under siege by their own bomb

Embarrassingly, I must confess that I only saw Escape From New York for the first time last night. Solid flick! Although not quite what I expected. I figured it would have the brash swagger of his mid-'80s action-oriented material, but falling as it does between The Fog and The Thing it makes sense in hindsight that it's actually a moodier and more meditative film than I'd imagined. Wanna see LA now even though I'm sure it isn't the sequel this thing deserved.

LA is bad

What's the word on Black Moon Rising? I was first alerted to its existence via a trailer compilation I own and thought 'THIS LOOKS AMAZING' even before I learned that there was a Carpenter connection.

Also need to get around to watching Somebody's Watching Me! so the title stops seeming like an indictment of my continued negligence.

FTR, I seem to enjoy Carpenter even when he is bad (eg Vampires and Ghosts of Mars).

Oh right, the other one I haven't seen and always forget he did: Memoirs of a See-Through Chevy Chase. Is there any point?

Nah, Carpenter didn't write it or do the soundtrack... it's pretty bad.

I've never seen Memoirs. I always forget about Starman (which is not a siege film).

Black Moon Rising he ... wrote? Like The Eyes of Laura Mars?

Yeah, he only wrote the screenplay (directed by the fella who helmed the feted Burt Reynolds vehicle Malone).But I mean just look at this thing and tell me it isn't simply drenched in unadulterated Carpenterism

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MFD9P-QupFs

They Live IS pretty good!

Kinda surprised you liked it!

Read the Lethem monograph on the film from several years back if you the chance.

*get the chance

well it's Carpenter at the limits of his talent, and he knew to give Roddy Piper fewer lines than he would Kurt Russell.

I'm here to chew bubble gum and listen to Morbs' insights into the horror genre, and Morbs is all outta insights into the horror genre.

yeah that famous one-liner is the kind that impresses lotsa 14-year-old boys

more scifi than horror, honeybunch

i did like that there isn't even a liplock with Meg Foster

Also that one-liner is the only memorable line in the whole movie, as far as I remember.

the line is great because Piper’s character is an idiot who would come up with something like that

I always felt like it stops the movie dead a bit, much like the endless fight scene. As much as I really like the film, I wish it didn’t wink so much.

the winking kinda elevates it for me

"Brother, life's a bitch, and she's back in heat."

the protractedness of the fight scene is what makes it work! put the goddman glasses on, you might say to your Trumpist relations as you pummel them.

Letham has a similar take on the fight scene, without the Trumpist angle (which didn’t exist yet). I get it; I just think the film is already goofy enough (the cheapo FX, the casting of a wrestler in the lead) that it didn’t need to run a highlighter over its sillier aspects.

/They Live/ IS pretty good!

morbs otm re: the fight scene

well, replace Reaganite for Trumpist at the time

the fight scene isn’t just protracted, it’s extremely awkward and graceless. It rules!

yeah, it's two stubborn tough dudes without anyone around to go "break it up guys"

also it goes on so long that it gets boring, then it goes on so much longer that it gets funny, then it keeps going and gets boring, and still keeps going so long that it gets funny again

And it's just about whether or not he will put on sunglasses!

Keith David, actor of Shakespeare and August Wilson, is perhaps best known for this film and his Ken Burns voiceover work.

(yes, i know he was in The Thing and Platoon)

you came so close to him

my Paramount studio tour went all over the set on Tuesday. Have never seen the show.

― joyless shithead (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 15, 2011 8:00 PM (eight years ago)

They Live is probably neck-and-neck with The Thing as my most-watched Carpenter at this point.

i'd kill to see Keith David do Shakespeare

well maybe he's got a Lear in front of him

I saw him in Wilson's Seven Guitars

Is there a more influential director this decade than John Carpenter? Nope. The Carpenter renaissance happening is music to my ears. It's about time we acknowledge how The Thing, Escape from NY, They Live, Halloween & Assault on Precinct 13 have aged like fine wine over the years https://t.co/RaaQCy3MwA

— Jordan Ruimy (@mrRuimy) October 24, 2019